In this short, Tom and Jerry are apparently on a cruise somewhere in the Pacific.

When Tom sees people surf, he naturally wants to join in. This leads to a cartoon full of gags, one of which is reused from the Disney classic ‘Hawaiian Holiday'(1937), then thirty years old. It also contains one gag that would have made Hanna and Barbera proud if it had been timed better. Now, most of the action is plain tiresome, resulting in yet another mediocre entry in Chuck Jones’s Tom & Jerry series.

As the title implies, this is a parody on the popular secret agent series ‘The Man from U.N.C.L.E.'(which aired from 1964 to 1968).

in this short Jerry is a secret agent who is after a huge stock of cheese, kept in a safe and heavily guarded by the evil ‘Tom Thrush’ (THRUSH was the arch-villain organisation of U.N.C.L.E. In the original series).

Director Abe Levitow and story man Bob Ogle clearly enjoy spoofing the spy cliches. The two are greatly helped by composer Dean Elliott, who provides a very apt sixties spy film musical score. This makes this entry also enjoyable for people who have never watched the original series, but who are familiar with, for example, James Bond.

This short has little to do with Tom & Jerry as originally conceived by Hanna and Barbera, but it is an entertaining cartoon, nonetheless. The film was to be the duo’s last enjoyable theatrical cartoon.

Watch ‘The Mouse from H.U.N.G.E.R.’ yourself and tell me what you think:

The story, by Bob Ogle, is inspired, if not anything new (it’s in fact the reverse of the classic Tom & Jerry cartoon ‘Saturday Evening Puss‘ from 1950): when Tom goes to sleep, Jerry rises to play drums with his hep-cat mice friends in the nightclub ‘Le Cellar Smoqué’.

This, of course, keeps Tom awake, and he desperately tries to get rid of the mice, only to succeed in bothering a large bulldog living in the same apartment block.

Unlike the other Tom & Jerry’s by Chuck Jones’s unit, this short has a lively jazzy score penned by a remarkably inspired Carl Brandt. In short, everything seems to come together for once in this cartoon, making this one of the best of the Chuck Jones Tom & Jerry’s.

After ‘O-Solar-Meow‘ Tom and Jerry immediately return to the science fiction setting in ‘Guided Mouse-ille’.

The time is 2565 AD and again, Tom and Jerry fight each other with modern technology, including the robot cat from ‘O Solar Meow’. In the end, our heroes are inexplicably blown to the prehistory, where they continue their chase.

Written by story man John Dunn (as was O-Solar-Meow), ‘Guided Mouse-ille’ is a very bad and terribly unfunny cartoon. Luckily, Tom & Jerry’s next short would be much more fun…

In a cartoon that looks forward to ‘2001 A Space Odyssey’ (which would be released the following year), Tom and Jerry inhabit a roulette-like space station.

Here they fight each other using modern technology, including a robot cat. In the end, Tom manages to shoot Jerry to the moon, but luckily for Jerry, it turns out to be made out of cheese.

This cartoon contains nice settings and some original ideas, but none of them are executed well, resulting in yet another mediocre Tom and Jerry cartoon produced by Chuck Jones. Tom & Jerry’s next cartoon, ‘Guided Mouse-ille‘, also has a science fiction setting. Interestingly, both these shorts were penned by story man John Dunn.

Tom’s listening to the radio where a french cook is telling about a fish recipe. Tom immediately tries to cook the goldfish in various ways, but Jerry, who’s the goldfish’s friend, rescues him again and again.

Unlike most Jerry-and-a-friend cartoons, ‘Jerry and the Goldfish’ is not cute, but fast and funny, with great gags coming in plenty, many of which involving deformations of Tom’s body. This makes ‘Jerry and the Goldfish’ easily one of the best Tom & Jerry cartoons using this theme. In 1966 Abe Levitow used the same story theme in the late Tom & Jerry cartoon ‘Fillet Meow‘, unfortunately with appalling results.

Watch an excerpt from ‘Jerry and the Goldfish’ yourself and tell me what you think:

In ‘Fillet Meow’ Tom is after a goldfish, who looks a little like Chloe from ‘Pinocchio‘ (1940). Of course Jerry tries to protect the cute little fish.

‘Fillet Meow’ was the third Tom & Jerry cartoon directed by Abe Levitow and by now quality standards had dropped almost to the level of the Gene Deitch Tom & Jerry shorts. The result is rather awful, and nowhere near the quality of the similar ‘Jerry and the Goldfish‘ (1951).

‘Jerry-Go-Round’ is staged at a circus: Jerry helps a circus elephant, who in turn protects Jerry from Tom.

This rather dull and unfunny cartoon marks the debut of animator Abe Levitow as a Tom & Jerry director. It is not a success. Levitow was an experienced director: in 1959 he had directed several Warner Brothers cartoons, and at UPA he had directed Mr. Magoo television specials, and the studio’s second feature, Gay-Purree (1962). Yet, this experience is hard to detect in ‘Jerry Go-Round’: both the designs, the timing and the animation are inferior to those in the cartoons directed by Chuck Jones himself.